Speedlights 101

Lesson 16 of 40

Shoot: Freezing Motion

Speedlights 101

Lesson 16 of 40

Shoot: Freezing Motion

Lesson Info

Shoot: Freezing Motion

What I want to do is see african freese emotion will have you swinging and we'll see how that goes the other thing I need to do um is get a different lindsay because this one will never focus that fast it's a one point two is really really slow so I think I have a twenty four to seventy in my bag um so kelsey maybe you can help find a twenty four to seventy and then as they're doing that um do we have some other questions because because he's gonna need to find my limbs we sure do you mark can I just say the internet is loving this oh yeah um let's say it's terrifying for munich not really but sort of all right hold on one second it's what you know let me just say this to the internets out there um a lot of times people have this misconception that uh there are some photographers that can just show up take a picture it's perfect and it works every time I have yet to meet that photographer and I have worked with a lot of photographers and so part of the risk for me doing this is it sort...

of puts me at risk of saying ok I'm human but I love that I am human and that's how it works so um if you have those experiences where you're trying to do something is not working out right now like uh don't give up, just keep shooting and practicing and you're gonna have a john that says, hey, did you check your eyes so you're gonna be all right and then you'll see that it works and so yeah, that's the fun of this, merkel ah, question from late seventy what about the seventy capability of being master to other flashes? Does that take the place of the s t to yes, it does? Yes, it does, and we're going to talk about that some more tomorrow, but, um, a lot of the newer cameras that cannon seventy most all night cons for the past, I don't know five, six, seven maybe ten years um and the five d mark to the one d x cannon the one d c I think they all have a controller built into them, and so you don't have to have, um you might still have to have an std, too, but what happens is you can put a flash on your camera and it can control all the functions from the flash from the body. And if you have a master on your camera a master flash, which we'll talk about tomorrow, you can go into your menus and you can set the zones you can set the different exposure compensations you can tell it to be in manual mode. And you can do a lot of things on the camera to control not only a flash and the camera but external cameras as well and so there are and I don't know the exact cameras that do this, but there are one or two cannons maybe three or four that do that and a lot of nikon and so that's again one of those reasons that a lot of people love night cons for speed lights because they were sort of ahead of the curve a lot of those things but yeah, the seventy that's one of the big things that was like wow, it's awesome and the five d mark three um took all of that with it and then the one d x has that and I think that's the excitement for me to see the new six hundred coming out the new flash and the wireless transmitters and stuff so we're like on the revolution of new speed light technology, which was really cool very cool so I guess there's quite a few questions about the battery pack on the lights can we confirm that? It's a quantum it is a quantum battery pack and we have two different kinds of quantum battery packs that were using way have the one that I bought years ago that still works wonderfully but it's big and it's heavy and we have the new orleans that we rented that work the same exact way they have the same amount of power but they're small and light and so the newer quantum battery packs are terrific the thing I love about quantum battery packs by the way is they work with plunge in flashes which are spectacular we might pull one of those out during this workshop I'm not sure if I'll have time I own one um there about triple the power of a nikon our cannon and so you really really get a lot of flash were doing earlier we were really sort fighting like can we get in of light if I had pulled out my quantum flash we wouldn't have been your problem um they're really expensive and there you have to sort of get used to using them that's why didn't pull it out but the other thing I love about condom battery packs is they'll work with the night kind of working the can and then work with vivid tars that worked with all kinds of flashes you just have to get the right connector so yeah condoms are awesome they're awesome all right so speaking of that having enough power question from doug stroud there's a soft box the four square that has an adapter mount that will allow force me flights to be mounted inside it to use high speed sync enforcement lights do you think this would solve the issue of not enough power at high shutter speed? Yes. It will in fact, we wanted to get one of those for this workshop, but I didn't get it done in time. It's going to have one. But my friend kevin cambodia actually has ah, bracket he created on his block shows it, um and I shot a video of him doing plus three using the plus threes in las vegas a w e p I and he had one of those and he was using it. And what he did is actually, he would put different flashes and different zones. And so if there was too much power, he turned a couple of those off. And so not only would you have all four flashes, but you could just have two flashes or just one flash or three flashes and so yeah, having that kind of bracket, it quadruples the power. So it is something that really works. And to see an example of just zip over to I think it's plus three that's a plus ii, that pocket was there dot com and there's a video of kevin cambodia shooting some stuff and he's got one of those it's really, really cool. Yeah. Does work? Well, very cool. Well, we have joey joyner in joey joyner gets is wanting to say hello, hello, joey and really rocks so awesome hi joey I'm going to be we're going to go to dinner with joy in dallas soon this week so there you go joey but joey had a question a lot earlier when we first started it was as the sun gets lower in the sky does the rate that it sets over the horizon increase? I don't know I think so I think it seems like it does seems like it goes you're going but there is an answer for that somewhere on this somebody's going goes a little tell you the right answer but I think it does but don't count on it um yeah, I think it does because it seems like uh it's gonna go so I think that the chances that it gives faster it's true but the law of physics says it doesn't cause the earth doesn't speed up any so why would it get fast? You don't know so feels like it but maybe not somebody please google that and tell us the right answer because I don't know I think that was an excellent answer mark e don't know it was a cargo was I'm joey joey did that now he's trying to trick me into some smarty pants question all right? Well, I think we're ready to keep moving, okay? We're going to try some stuff maybe it'll work maybe it won't we'll see so we're going to do here is the light is low now are you freezing still okay what we're gonna have you do is to swing the swinging I was not gonna fall down right? Okay it's very creaky so what I'm going to do here is um first let me see this actually khun see you know let's do this kelsey's let's just put the camera the flash on the camera okay just just do that I haven't even thought of that tonight it didn't even occur to me to ever shoot with my flash on my camera tonight which you know that's what you that you can tell how much I love shooting with my flash on my camera which is I don't I don't like it it off okay all right so what I'm doing is I'm taking this and I'm putting on to normal tl mode turning the remote stuff off he's getting it into that and then I'm gonna put on rear curtain sink on this camera so it flashes at the end and then I'm going to do is I'm going to try to get some motion pictures here so what I'm gonna do is shooting in manual mode I'm gonna crank down my shutter speed to something really slow like a third of a second am I shooted about f sixteen something like that and then I'm also going to put this in aye aye survival mode so it sort of we'll focus as we d'oh d'oh okay, now this is crazy this isn't a flattering picture I'm sorry um this picture this shutter speed is one third of a second one third of a second so this should be totally blurry but what we talked about earlier this morning is that the flashes going to freeze motion better than our shutter will so just approve this I'm going to take this down to let's say one second one second and the other thing that you can watch is the ninja in action so we talked about the ninja this morning that free flash I want to show it to you right now hopefully we'll have a frame rate that this works so I don't take a picture and then I'm gonna put this at a half a second for them takes along I'll take a picture and then a half a second later the flash of fire so a flyer once that's the ninja half a second later fire again we're using rear curtains think so here it goes three to one there's the ninja and then there's the flash pretty cool so john suggested that thank you very much and so do we see that didn't show up in the ok so the frame rate was good so I'll do that a little bit slower we'll put that at one second and you can see how this works there goes here's the ninja and then a second later there's the flash and so you can see that that works great and so now we're gonna do is we're gonna take a picture of you and we're going to shoot at a really slow shutter speed going to get some of this motion and then yeah it's really good dough yeah flash later ok totally blurry totally blurry this flash did flash did not flash I think I might have dead batteries yeah so can we get a quantum pack for this plan to do it one more time with the flash way yeah awesome okay this will help this flash to stay alive okay well he's got that way should be good good see what we're getting here we're getting sort of this motion okay awesome well it wouldn't have you not swing just for a second now one of the things that's happening with her swinging around is that the free flashes firing when she's at one location and then a flash is firing when she's somewhere else so the exposure is changing because the distance between the flash and her is changing so we know that that will change our exposure so going to some some things here I've got so many cables on is really awesome I love it so we're going to actually do a little intentional motion here is that crazy I shot for one second and we still have a totally frozen picture so I want to see if I can get this okay, it's gonna be out of focus. There we go. That's crazy one second exposure totally frozen. What have you come over here this way? I'm trying to get is some of the light that we have behind us for having the lights that we can turn on. Okay, let's, turn that one on. You need some lights in the background to sort of make this work has too much chelsea too much. Okay, so we're going to try this again at one second, one second and I am going to not use you. I'm going to use a real curtain sink. What I'm doing here is I'm gonna move my camera around and look what I get here. I have lots and lots tobler and at the last second I have frozen jin sound like a drink. Uh, so that's what we're getting and we can do some things that are sort of interesting, so I'm going to take this. I'm going to take this offering a curtain sink and I'm going to take a picture, lindsay amounts and see how we have ghost of jim there and it comes way out we have too much ambient light for that to work don't take this down to a half a second instead try it one more time here we go okay, there we go okay, so that background being all blurred is me zooming this lens this is something that's terrific if you have like christmas lights or something like that but using our flash to freeze you is going to give us that totally frozen stuff and that's the joy of this so we're going to be shooting ninjas showing you sort of how this works but I can move my camera all around the background is blurred but you're not now we said earlier if you want to shoot kids or something like that on halloween or outside put your camera and shutter priority mode put it at sixty eighth of a second and then shoot away so I'm gonna try that out see if it works we're going like you're a kid check that out yeah move around a lot, eh? Yeah ok perfect check this out everything's frozen it's all in focus everything's exposed right and we don't care about the background you very flattering, isn't it? Hey, it is it works great that's awesome. So that kind of stuff works great. You know if you have kids or ah reception or something let's say kelsey is at a wedding and she's at a table I need to get a picture of her I don't care about the background is going to put this on sixty of them a second and take a picture plan just like that I have the picture and I could get a better picture than that this is one of those who cares about the background shots I have kelsey I am searching right now have kelsey in this shot it looks decent it looks good I could put this on aperture priority mode remember average your priority mode what is it going to do it's going to slow the shutter speed way down to try to capture the ambient light let's listen to what the camera does so again tells his over here three yeah and it wasn't even in focus sorry look how much ambient light we got there I'm gonna put this back into one shot and put this back in one shot really fast here we go kelsey did not know I was gonna be taking your picture tonight okay check that out here's the problem with aperture priority mail we talked about it earlier although I got some ambient light it looks great looking kelsey she is totally out of focus which is no good so what we need to do is try to get more of the ambient light maybe but a flash back there but that's the problem some people have is the sea if you get john engine together right here I've got my camera and what you might want to put it on which is aperture priority mode uh it doesn't work it doesn't work it's too blurry I'll put this in manual mode we talked about that today I'm just going to say who cares who cares about the ambient light we don't care wanna put this at two point eight I'm gonna put this at er say sixty eighth of a second so I don't have any kind of camera shake I don't care about my ambient light don't try to take a picture out here seeking document the moment that works ex cool but I want more ambient light back there maybe put in extra flash you get the idea some of those moves we talked about this morning put them into practice it actually works. Okay, we're out of time it's freezing it's time to go home because we have to get up in the morning and do another workshop so we have susan in kenya that are going to come out in a little bit because they ask him questions for us I think the right oh, they have lights well, they get life do I get like, you know there are always questions mark your questions. Okay. Always always questions. Um let's. See? Well, there's a couple questions here we have one from picks me lay who would like to know if the quantum works on the camera battery as well ah, yes, you can get this one doesn't but yeah, quantum makes uh uh, a battery pack that goes on the bottom of the camera and it powers the camera and the flash and you can get quite impacts that go inside that you conserve the wedding it's not flopping around on your on your shoulder like this, and you can conceal it and you can power both things as well. So, yes, they have all that stuff. Okay? And from tnm, can you explain what's again? Your steps on how you are grabbing the correct exposure without t t l yes, this will be very difficult after, um, the correct ambient light exposure flash exposure. I'm not exactly sure when the question came in and what you were talking about at that point, although I'm not sure. So, um, the flash is on tio, so the flash exposure is t ell, um, to get the correct ambient light, some of those I said I don't care and it's not a correct exposure, but when I'm, uh I'm using I am using through the lens metering on all this stuff. If I was in manual mode, I'm looking at the meter inside my viewfinder and adjusting my shutter an aperture too, to get that to the correct place, so we showed you earlier how to do should in manual mode earlier in the day. That that's, how I'm doing that. So I'm using t t l for everything except when I'll have this in manual mode. And then I'm just using my meter inside my viewfinder.

Class Description

Once you know what’s happening with your camera and flash you can do almost anything. Speedlights open up a new realm in your photography. They are light to carry, quick to set up. And you never know when you're going to need that extra light for a more dramatic image.

This workshop will give you the confidence to incorporate small portable flash in your photography toolkit. From shooting receptions at weddings or adding drama in senior portraits, this workshop will include lots of live shooting examples that will help everything make sense. Get ready to take your photography to the next level. Once you start working with portable flash, you'll never understand how you lived without them.

Alexander Svishchenkov

Great! I'm so thankful to you, CreativeLive, for providing this great opportunity to learn an important subject of photography - Speedlights - from the professional Mark Wallace. He is such a good teacher and explains everything in real-life situations and on slides. As he fires his flash, I instantly see the resulting photo on my screen, so this is theory combined with practice. I'm in fact watching you from Belarus, and it's midnight, so I'm fighting with sleep, but I can't get myself away from the screen. this is my 1st CL experience. I'm very grateful for running a rewatch of the previous Day the following morning, so I woke up and saw what I'd missed. And it's totally free! Thank you so much for a true first-class education!

Aussie David

Truly a fabulous class. Mark has such a gift for taking a complex subject and making it so understandable and fun at the same time. Mark is easily one of the best instructors out there. Highly highly highly recommend this class.

a Creativelive Student

Thank you!! You rock!!! I just purchased the videos and I am looking forward to learning how to use my Nikon SB 910. I knew I had to purchase the videos as I have been glued to my monitor soaking up as much information as I can and neglecting my family. LOL Mark, I am grateful that you are sharing your knowledge and for the CreativeLIVE team providing the education to me. I am so excited to put all this information to use. Thank you for the wealth of information!